by Robert Fiskwww.dissidentvoice.org
July 21, 2004First Published in
The Independent

This
is how they like it. An American helicopter fires four missiles at a house
in Fallujah. Fourteen people are killed, including women and children. Or so
say the hospital authorities.

But no Western journalist
dares to go to Fallujah. Video footage taken by local civilians shows only a
hole in the ground, body parts under a grey blanket and an unnamed man
shouting that young children were killed.

The US authorities say they
know nothing about the air strike; indeed, they tell journalists to talk to
the Iraqi Ministry of Defense--whose spokesman admits that he has "no clue
what is going on".

And by the time, in early
afternoon yesterday, that the American-appointed Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad
Allawi, said that he had given permission for the attack--even though US
rules of engagement give him no such right--there had been car bombs in
Tikrit in which two policemen died, one of Saddam's former generals was
captured, and Fallujah became just another statistic, albeit a deeply
disturbing one: this is the sixth air strike on the insurgent-held city in
less than five weeks.

None of the six was
independently reported. The dead were "terrorists", according to Mr.
Allawi's office. So were the doctors lying?

As in Afghanistan, so in
Iraq. US air strikes are becoming "uncoverable", as the growing insurgencies
across the two countries make more and more highways too dangerous for
foreign correspondents. Senior US journalists claim that Washington is happy
with this situation; bombing wedding parties and claiming the victims were
terrorists--as has happened three times in a year--doesn't make good
headlines. Reporters can't be blamed for not travelling--but they ought to
make it clear that a Baghdad dateline gives no authenticity to their work.
Fallujah is only 25 miles from Baghdad but it might as well be 2,500 miles
away. Reports of its suffering could be written in Hull for all the
reliability they convey.

Here, then, is the central
crisis of information in Iraq just now. With journalists confined to
Baghdad--several have not left their hotels for more than two weeks--a
bomb-free day in the capital becomes a bomb-free day in Iraq. An
improvement. Things might be getting better. But since most journalists
don't tell their viewers and readers that they cannot travel--they certainly
don't reveal that armed "security advisers" act as their protectors--they do
not see the reality of cities such as Fallujah, Ramadi and Samara, which are
now outside all government control. Indeed, US Marines are no longer allowed
into the centre of Fallujah, which is now run by the Fallujah Brigade, made
up of former Baathists and current insurgents. The Independent does not use
security advisers in Iraq, armed or otherwise.

So what happened in
Fallujah? The US attack on the house at 2am yesterday turned the building
into a pit of earth in which small bomb fragments and arms and legs were
found. Locals described the building as the home of poor people. Angry
crowds of men cried "God is Great" at the site. And then an official in Mr.
Allawi's office announced that "the multinational forces [ie the Americans]
asked Prime Minister Allawi for permission to launch strikes on some
specific places where terrorists were hiding and Allawi gave his
permission."

Precisely the same formula
was used by Iraqi authorities 84 years ago when RAF aircraft made "precise"
attacks on Iraqi towns and villages supposedly sheltering insurgents opposed
to British occupation. Ironically, one of the US bases near Fallujah
currently under constant nightly attack by Iraqi gunmen is Habbaniya--the
very air base from which British bi-planes had staged their air strikes.

On an Islamist
website--and, in truth, no one knows who controls it--Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
one of Osama bin Laden's junior fighters, claimed that Saturday's suicide
attacks on the Iraqi Justice Minister and a military recruitment centre in
Mohammediya, which killed a total of eight Iraqis, were his work. The US
military blamed the bombings on "people who want to stop the progress of
democracy in this country"--which is an odd way of describing an
organization that allegedly wants to destroy not just the US-appointed
government here but the United States itself.

The capture in Tikrit of
General Sufian Maher Hassan of Saddam's Republican Guard was being portrayed
as another success by the US army. However, since General Hassan was in
charge of the defense of Baghdad in 2003 and is mockingly regarded as the
man who turned a potential Stalingrad into one of the easiest American
military victories of modern times--which is not exactly correct, but that
is another story--his capture is not going to change the deteriorating
security crisis in Iraq.

With ghoulish relish,
meanwhile, Saudi Wahabists posted the execution of an American captive in
Saudi Arabia on a website. The pictures showed a man in a white apron sawing
at the neck and vertebrae of John Palmer before eventually placing his
severed head on the back of his torso.

Given such gruesome proof
of Western vulnerability, it's no surprise that journalists in Iraq--where
similar videos have been made--want to avoid the same fate. But it's not
just the killers who want to keep the reporters indoors.